Roman Legionary Helmet Overview - Helmet Courtesy of Metatron

salvo noble ones I am the Metatron obviously I'm not the Metatron I'm at Easton but and this is Scala gladiatori channel not Metatron channel but essentially this is his helmet and you know I've wanted to get my hands on Raphael OHS helmet for a long time and he's actually sent three of them to me he's coming over to my club tonight and yeah so for economic reasons it made sense for him to ship some helmets to me and then I'll give them to him and the he'll take them home blah blah blah but he said that I could take them out of the box and have a play with them well I'm not going to do that to such but I did stick one on my head out of curiosity I've never worn a Roman style helmet before and I know very little relatively little about this style of helmet this isn't completely mouse on my head obviously it should be tied there and this kind of stuff you get a kind of leather thong with it these incidentally were purchased from the knight shop I'll put the link below to the knight shop and of course I'll put the link to Raffaello Metatron's channel but given that I've never worn one of these before but I've worn lots of other types of helmets I thought it might be interesting to give a kind of a noobs a kind of noobs view on the Roman helmet of the kind of illusionary I suppose and there's a few this is a very characteristic design I believe these were worn in probably their what about the fourth centrum first century AD and they're quite characteristic round top a bit like a kind of builders helmet without a brim although we do have a little bit of a brim here I talked about that in a second a couple of cheek pieces and then a neck piece and then sometimes they've got stuff on the top haven't they sometimes cross bars and stuff like this so let's take it off my head because it's not sat on there terribly securely I can actually hear better now now that's the first thing I'm going to mention what surprised me when putting this on is one of the things unlike medieval helmets these Roman soldiers helmets have cutouts for the ears now not to say that no medieval or Renaissance helmets had those there there are some there are a very very small number and some certainly kind of late medieval and renaissance helmets have little perforations or holes in this you can hear better but the fact that the Roman helmet makes so much effort to leave this opening here actually tells you an awful lot about the Roman soldier and the way that the Roman army functioned and of course they were exceedingly well coordinated and well trained and we have to be honest even though I'm a medievalist the Roman army really was more professional and more well trained than basically all medieval armies and you probably don't find the parallel for Roman armies until you get to the 16th 17th century in terms of training and professionalism and this kind of thing and the fact that they've got these openings for the airholes really tells you an awful lot in my view and this is all my opinion and conjecture and I'm not a classical kind of academic or anything like that but to me it tells you an awful lot about the Roman army and how it functioned and that they considered these earholes to be extremely important ultimately you know you'd be sacrificed a little bit of protection but I would say even more than that if you're churning out thousands and thousands of helmet helmets for your army like this putting this extra bit on it's quite a lot of extra effort and it shows how important and how critical they thought hearing was for their soldiers for giving giving orders and commands both at low level presumably in small units but also right the way up you know the use of trumpets and drums and other instruments to give signals coordinate movements incredibly important right a few other things I'm just gonna dash through again I'm no Roman helmet expert but a few things that I think are interesting about Roman helmets first of all the treat pieces and they're a very good way of giving facial protection without really limiting vision ok so this has got very good visibility I'm pretty good facial protection and they're fairly comfortable and equally breathing as well so breathing visibility and hearing three things that really are optimized on this type of helmet next thing I would say is the brim so I think it's very very interesting I know of people who have in reenactment worn sort of Norman and a low Saxon or Frankish period conical helmets or Spang and Helms and one of the things that can happen sometimes as an accident is a weapon will ride down and hit the person in the nose or the chin usually it doesn't hit you around here because by the time it's come off the rim of the helmet it's fairly far away but it might come back in towards the face so having that there will actually prevent strikes and other things coming down here from carrying down into the face very easily okay so that's that that rim actually adds quite a lot of protection from downwards blows but potentially it has other reasons as well so if someone was giving a hard crushing blow with a club or an axe or something like this possibly even a sword a Gallic sword for example or even just a large stick let's face it or shield edge if it was coming down here on the helmet what this does is it massively reinforces the brow of the helmet so anything coming down here is going to be absorbed by this rim rather than the relatively thin helmet Bowl okay so it means you don't have to make the helmet bowl overly thick or overly strong just by adding this rim in here it really makes it stronger and we should note that later on in the day see in campaigns against the falc0n basins they added cross pieces right the way across the helmet to try and prevent against the faults and other weapons being used in that campaign from actually striking through the top of the helmet so clearly this was their way of preventing that type of injury so presumably when they have a rim here they're mostly concerned about blows coming in like this or sliding down but when they have the cross piece on the top they're more concerned about things actually hitting the very top of the helmet these very nice decorative almost sort of feather like or winged like sort of relief punch sort of decoration forged lines in here do an awful lot to actually do that as well they actually strengthen it's like corrugated iron instead of flat iron so the very fact that you've got these corrugations increase the strength of the of the bolt at that point and we see exactly the same thing with later gothic fluting so-called gothic fluting on 15th and 16th century german armor in particular but you do find it on other on export armors or in english armors and french armors and so on and so forth so these kind of flutes if we call them that do greatly without any without adding any real extra weight to the helmet so you don't have to make it thicker they increase the strength an awful lot there it's very clear that they are there not only because they look cool where they do look kind of cool don't they maybe I'm not on my head but on Raphael eyes they're probably really cool they do you know that they're placed in the regions where you're most likely to get hit ok and probably one of the last physical features of the helmet that I would mention is this great big projection at the back now formerly I would have just said ass to protect the back of the head but you don't need it to spread out like that do you now it just so happens that I worked on a BBC production where we did quite a bit of filming and quite a bit of training but it never actually came to the TV screens unfortunately that happens with lots of TV productions they go through a lot of pre filming stages and then they get canned shelved at the they get shelved at the final stages and they never actually make it to your TV screens which is a great shame but what this program was was essentially training some people up in gladiatorial combat now right at the beginning of this I said to them look I'm not a Roman expert I'm not a gladiatorial expert I'm a later system Hema instructor and late but they wanted me anyway and so I went away and I did lots of reading I spoke to various people out there like Olaf Coopers and various other people who do Roman period gladiatorial stuff so I picked up as much knowledge from them as possible I read a lot of books and then I started looking at the weapons and the equipment and working out how I thought these things could have been used and then in the training process with these essentially guinea pigs who were taking part in the in the pre program filming stuff and training stuff we we experimented and we got to a stage actually where people were was taking part in the training myself we were actually getting kind of I think quite efficient at using the weapons that we were using we were mostly focused on the types of gladiators that use various types of shield and various types of sword for example the Thracian and and so and so forth we were also looking quite a lot at the reti arias and using the trident and the net and those were the main two that we focused on we were looking at other gladiator types but we decided to focus our training on those two to begin with especially because quite a number of the gladiator types essentially are using a type of short sword and a type of shield so it made sense to focus on that and then something very different from that as well so that we could have not always sword and shield against sword and shield but some shield against something else and obviously I have a fair amount of experience with spears and bayonets so that transferred to some degree to the Trident but the Trident equally is quite a different weapon and obviously using the net as well that introduces lots of things were foreign to me at the time but coming back to why this well so one thing that we found and bear in mind we were using essentially padded wooden weapons that were the real weight but with padding on we were wearing hema protection and fencing masks so we but we were aiming to targets that wouldn't be protected for those gladiators so for example if the gladiator was wearing a large helmet we were pretty much ignoring head hits because those helmets are pretty much invulnerable to sword stabs and cuts okay so what aiming that we were aiming to stab or cut the person in places where that type of gladiator wouldn't have protection and what we found is that when you've got a Scouten type shield and when you've got a short sword and you've got a big helmet the person becomes incredibly difficult to actually wound in the upper body because essentially they've got a huge shield covering them from sort of face to knee on one side their legs are very hard to get at and they've got a sword on this side so they've got danger side they've got a complete wall side and then they've essentially got the top line completely covered as well and what was interesting is so one of the lines that you'd often find when you come shield against shield and you start stabbing and this is another thing about stabbing versus cutting we that stabbing I know that Roman authors said that they were trained to stab and some people think oh they preferred the stab for x y&z reasons but what we found is with this equipment it was very difficult to get cuts in there were only a few cuts which were really plausible and actually a lot of them were raking cuts with the back edge but that's for another video but what we found is a very common blow that was coming in was with the right arm with a stab coming over the top like this if your opponent has a large shield covering this area you can't get around it very easily you can't get under it you can't really come around this way because your own shields in the way and you're coming across your body so one of the most common attacks is a thrust stab coming downwards from the right hand side and of course where does that come done it comes down over the top here into the top of your shoulder back of your neck and onto that shoulder blade at the back boom okay in my opinion these projections at the back of these Roman helmets are absolutely there because of this phenomenon when you're using a short stabbing sword and a large shield Scouten this so if my opponent is facing me here my stabs are very often going to be coming down here and if the opponent has that large projection what it does is it blocks my stab from coming around the back of the helmet not only does it block the stab from coming down into the person's back or shoulder but it also blocks off the line of if I'm trying to do raking cuts with the back edge to try and get to the back of the neck which would be a really effective thing to do so I absolutely think that the Roman soldiers at helmet matches and is designed and evolves in conjunction with the other weapons I mean this should be I think pretty much a unquestionable point it's certain that this equipment all evolved together but to me this particular phenomenon of the fact that these stabs from above are coming over the shield and around the back is why that projection is like that okay right okay so I'm gonna wrap it up there but a pretty cool helmet I'm sure wrath will be talking some more about these helmets interview I know he's got some very good rep because these are cheaper lower end replicas from the night shop Indian made I think mass-produced then they're not completely accurate before any of you started going oh this should be a little bit narrower and that should be a little bit I mean for a start I think that helmet bowl is probably too round it should be a bit more oval maybe should be a bit narrower this way certainly from my head the cheap pieces sit too far away from my face so absolutely a custom-made one or an artisan made one would be better than this but it gives you a very good impression of some of the standard features we see on the classic legionaries Legion F legionaries house getting Legionnaire in legionary mix-up legionaries helmet from about the first century you know this kind of this kind of period and you know they did evolve they were if you go back earlier they were slightly different they weren't quite as developed to dish if you go later or if you go late enough you start to see the beginnings of what we see with the early kind of anglo-saxon and Frankish helmets with bigger cheek pieces and less of a projection at the back which again may be linked to the shield views maybe because they were switching to slightly smaller and oval and round shields rather than the big scoot ins I'm sure there's some connection er anyway there's my views my impressions of a Roman helmet I'm no expert but I do have some insights which hopefully were interesting for you to watch cheers folks and bye to the noble ones who are watching this as well stay Noble 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Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 49,770

Rating: 4.9723134 out of 5

Keywords: roman helmet, roman legionary, roman armour, roman legionary equipment, roman army soldier, roman history

Id: qNBQ0JQrkNg

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 17 2018